MicroStrategy Mobile

MicroStrategy Mobile is a key piece of the company’s overall BI
marketing platform over the last couple of years. Along with social and
cloud, its one of the key places of growth within the company.

For several years, they had a Blackberry version available for their
enterprise customers but it wasn’t widely used. While executives loved
their Blackberries for e-mail, the small screen and lack of a good
interface made it tough for business intelligence. Most of the
functionality was reduced to just some basic grid reports. The
popularity of Apple products, tablets, and smartphones in general in the
last few years made a big enough market to start tackling mobile
projects in a more widespread way. MSTR was one of the first BI vendors
to release a native iPad and iPhone app, in mid-2010. Recently,
they’ve added support to Android, and still support RIM and Blackberry.
They are focused heavily on the Apple mobile ecosystem though, and
their Intro to Mobile BI and general marketing is geared toward it.

While
they have always had a strong partner network, especially for ETL,
database, and industry knowledge, they are leveraging it in the apps
market as well. Here's a look at some of the iPhone apps.

By making mobile
part of the larger platform, MSTR has tried to make it easy for
dashboard creators to create applications that will work on the mobile
devices. Out of the box, users can access most reports and documents
that they would be able to view on the web. The size limits and gesture
based functionality in iPads and iPhones make some customization
necessary for dashboards to work seamlessly there. The “cool” factor
though, has made it a strong marketing option to push to executive,
retailers, and other companies with remote sales forces. Many companies
are taking a little bit of a cautious approach, most often citing
concerns with security, device cost, and support. Other BI vendors have
taken a little bit of a wait and see approach to building their own
technology.